When Jirard Khalil is twelve years old, his mother suddenly starts to change.
Jirard Khalil is a YouTuber, actor, writer, and performer. You can find him online at @JKCompletesIt on Twitter, and That One Video Gamer on YouTube.
This story originally aired on May 26, 2017.
Story Transcript
My last name is Khalil because when my father emigrated to the states when he was young, they switched his middle and last names. So I’m technically first generation Khalil. I have no relatives with the last name. I am the first and hopefully not the last.
But I want to share a story today about how they met and kind of just the wonders of the world and how things kind of pan out. I wrote a three-page paper basically so bear with me as we get through this.
So Charles Khalil, or Charles Richez, as I've expressed to him, came from the country of Lebanon in a war-torn state when he was… he moved to the states when he was about eighteen years old. He got really tired of living in a country that’s falling apart and he wanted to make a name for himself by coming to America. So he moved to America, he learned five languages, took several classes, worked several jobs. He was a mechanic, he was a teacher assistant, he was a janitor. He did anything and everything he could learn about American culture any single way.
Eventually, he met my mom, Karen Reid, at a gas station one day. He was the manager of a Mobil gas station. Actually… I think that gas station is actually on Pico and Westwood. So we’re actually not that far away from it, ironically enough.
He was managing this gas station and he saw this beautiful blond woman come out. She ran out of gas and she had no money to her name, and he didn’t care. He was instantly magnetized to her. He saw her and became infatuated with her. Back in the day, obviously everyone smoked so he was like, “Hey, I got some cigarettes, I got some money. Let’s go hang out.”
So they went on a date ironically enough, and everything kind of went hunky-dory from there. They got married after dating for ten years and they had five kids. I am the youngest of five kids so I’m the baby. My brother… I'll start in order because that’s how I always learned to do that. My sister Leila was always the calculated, smart one of the group that was always scared to meet new people but very judgmental.
My brother was the aggressive jock named Jacque, who was five-foot-six but like jumping in the face of the biggest quarterback head-butt first into them. So was kind of an abrasive guy.
My sister Monika was kind of the crazy, rebellious one who smoked weed and stayed out late and never responded to her parents via pager. It was kind of rebellious.
And then my sister Kelly was the socialite. She was the one that was like always going to Pop Warner and student council president and got good grades and was very controlling and educated and had to have things a specific way.
And then there's me the problem child. I was very quiet in the family. I didn’t contribute much. I was a shy boy who didn’t really like to do anything but play video games. Look at how that turned out. And I had a health problem. I was born with a spinal hemangioma, which was this benign tumor that was embedded in my spine. Back in the day, no one knew anything about this.
This part of the story, while it seems science-y, isn’t actually the science-y focus. It’s just letting you know for context.
So when I was growing up, money was not really around. But my father grew into it because my mom’s dream was to own a flower shop. So his whole life he worked hard for her and he got her a flower shop. Then she wanted to have five kids, so they had five kids. He wanted to make money and provide and really care for his family.
And right around my tenth birthday, my parents stopped being parents. They just kind of were like, Ah, we did four. The last one can kind of take care of himself. But more importantly, my mom started changing. I saw a change in her that was very different and very weird.
To give you an idea, my father owns three Mobil gas stations in southern Los Angeles as well as owns a marketing company based around Mobil Oil and the convenience industry. So if you go to like a Chevron or a Mobil gas station or a Circle K and you see all the nice pretty back bar design and stuff, my father is probably one of the people that brought that to the table.
So he in the nineties was thriving in this industry. He was making million-dollar deals and working his butt off. My mom was taking care of all five of us kids doing… you know, there's five of us so that means we all have to learn languages, we all have to play eighteen different instruments, we had to be on student council and cotillion and Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts and all that stuff. So she was a super person. She was a super mom. She's doing all these incredible things.
Around my tenth birthday, she just was like, “This sucks. I don't want to do this anymore.” So my dad said, “Well, what can we do, Karen? What can I do next? You wanted the flower shop, I got you the flower shop. You wanted the kids, I got you the kids. You wanted the money, we got the money. What more can I do for you? I want to make sure that this family is a family.”
Of course my mom was like, “No, no, no. That’s not what I mean. It’s just I can’t be a super mom all the time. I need to do something for me and for our family in a way that doesn’t feel like I’m just doing a nine to five.”
So my mom got this idea. She wanted to make her kids a star, or one of them at least. A star. That was her whole thing is she wanted to make someone famous. She knew nothing about the music industry. She knew nothing about fame or fortune in that regard. She didn’t know anything, but all she knew was that she wanted to do this thing.
And she was very driven. My mom was a very driven person. Ah, the things that she would do.
So she got what she wanted. My father financed her company. And this company was awful, just waste of money. No direction, had no contacts, no one involved was able to kind of help her shape what she was doing. She was kind of fledgling and she didn’t know what to do.
Then she met a man named Bill Head. Now, Bill Head was a country singer, a retired musician from Kansas City who had moved out to California to try and get his hands into young talent and produce them and kind of live off of their royalties. And he had an idea of the music industry.
He kind of came in. He was like six-foot-four, skinny, just long greasy hair, hat, glasses, very like you don’t trust this guy. It’s just kind of creepy.
So he and my mom started this company together. And when I say started this company together, I mean he asked for money and she gave him everything he asked for. Lo and behold, this man known as Bill Head was actually not Bill Head. He was a con man from Tennessee who had just convinced my mom to give him over five hundred thousand dollars in hopes to create this company.
But at that point my mom was so excited and so happy to see what she was building that the money that she was spending didn’t really matter. She was happy and she started changing even more and more and more as the days went on.
Eventually, she found herself back into faith. My family is technically Catholic, Christian, but we don’t really go to church or anything. But my mom suddenly got re-energized by faith. And Bill at the time, this guy was like, “Oh, yeah. I know all about faith. I know all the pastors and the people from the West Coast to the East Coast. Let’s go on a tour.”
So suddenly I, having a medical condition, was yanked out of school and I did a tour with my mom and this stranger to all the different pastors from the West Coast to the East Coast. So there's probably even footage of me online somewhere. The Trinity Broadcasting Network they used to have those public sermons when the guys would smack you in the head and you’d fall over, and the tongues are coming out. There's got to be footage of me somewhere, a twelve-year-old me just getting smacked in the head and waking up in the hotel room the next day.
But my mom took me on this incredibly long journey that made no goddamn sense. I should not have gone. I should not have graduated into sixth grade. I missed nine months of school and I didn’t really remember much of that time.
But what I did remember was I saw my mom transformed. She went from being the woman who was about strong principles and family and love and care to a woman who was being manipulated into someone who loved drinking and alcohol and drugs and trusted everyone, and had no ability to judge or say what she was doing. She was just kind of feeding the machine, if you will.
So after nine months of traveling on the road meeting minister after minister, I stole her cell phone and I called my dad, and I said, “I want to come home.” My dad, for some weird reason, didn’t piece together that I was with her. He thought that there were caretakers at home, because my father was running a business. He was travelling all over the world, literally every single week. So he was like, “Why are you not in school?”
So he pieced them together and said, “Oh, my God. He needs to go home.”
So my mom comes back from this long trip and my dad looks at the bank account statements and all of the money and all the trips and everything, and she had spent a lot of money, maxed her credit cards, all this stuff. My dad was like, “What happened? What’s going on?”
And my mom said, “I don't care. I’m sad in this relationship. I’m getting a divorce. It’s over.”
My father, most men in this situation would probably freak out, be upset, and really just like go through a lot of emotional changes. My father, for some weird reason, didn’t. He was kind of like somebody who’s playing poker and just was like, “I know what I’m doing. Now, something is not right.”
So he assessed everything that was going on, and my mom was talking about divorce, taking all of his hard work and the family and the kids. All of us kids saw everything. We witnessed everything that was going on, and we knew that something wasn’t right.
So my father said, “You can divorce me and take everything you want as long as you go with me to the doctor.”
And she was like, “Oh, that’s easy. Let’s go to the doctor. That sounds like an easy, easy trip.” Well, that trip to the doctor lasted about three and a half months’ worth of testing. She got tested and tested and tested and no one knew what was wrong with her, but there was something chemically wrong in her brain. They couldn’t figure out why she was changing the way that she was.
It took almost two and a half years from there, I was fourteen years old. It was my first day of high school and we’re all getting together. I get called out of class. We go to the doctor’s office over in Gardena. And the doctor says, “Your mom has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.”
Now, frontotemporal dementia is basically Alzheimer’s, except where Alzheimer’s is more the back of the brain, the frontal lobes or the lobes in the front are more the emphasis of this illness. And what we saw was instead of someone forgetting who she knew or memories or anything, she actually regressed in the way where she forgot things and how to talk and how to communicate and how to be a human being.
I remember sitting there in the room and everyone in the room is crying around me. I’m sitting there going, Okay, I know we’re all sad but what’s the next step because this is going to suck for a long time. We need to kind of push forward. So that’s when things changed one final time where I didn’t think I was going to go in this really big journey.
So my mom basically degraded to the state of a child until she passed away. But what was interesting is how the body remembered everything of who she was long after she was gone from her brain. What I mean is this. Every morning at five a.m. fourteen-year-old Jirard with his big brother and his dad would wake up at five a.m., bathe my mom, feed her, clothe her, get her ready for her nap. I'd go to school, I'd do my comedy sports and my improv classes and my drama classes, and I come home and I'd finish up what was left off, and then I'd do homework at eleven, twelve o’clock midnight. I did it over and over and over again until I was eighteen years old and looking to go to schools.
And in the middle of my sophomore year, usually someone who’s diagnosed with FTD lasts about six and a half months, mostly due to malnutrition, just not getting enough food, not eating enough, not being present in the moment in listening and reacting. So the doctor… she was on life support, she wasn’t doing well. They said that she's just not going to make it.
So one day my dad and I were sitting at home and he started going through family albums and photos and videos sort of archiving how they met and reminisced about all these things they did together and the lives they built. He popped in an old video cassette of my mom making this lasagna dish, this one that her mother had taught her when she was a kid. One of her favorite dishes. And she had this particular way of how much cheese and what kind of noodle product and what kind of meat went into it.
My dad just kind of said, “This is really stupid, but what if she's still in there somewhere? What if we can prepare this dish and her body will remember what it was like to make it and what it was like to create it, what it was like to eat it and get her out of the hospital?” Because she wasn’t drinking any Ensure, she was ripping out IVs, she was causing problems for everyone.
So we made this meal, this lasagna, and she instantly ate all of it with her fist. Just consumed it as much as she could. And for eighteen months, from then on, she ate lasagna breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every single day. We got up early, we made lasagna by the bulk and it was in the fridge, and it was nice and cookie-cut clean. Sometimes if we weren’t home, she’d sneak in the fridge and eat it just cold because that’s what she wanted.
After that, she got sick of it, so we said what do we do? We need a new dish. My dad said, “Well, one of the favorite things she loved was going to the Chinese restaurant, the Szechuan that was down the street from our house.” And she loved honey-glazed walnut shrimp, and that restaurant was still open, so my dad went down there and he bought ten pounds of honey-glazed walnut shrimp, brought it back, plopped it down, and she ate that every single day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for another three years.
So we were retroactively keeping her alive by using the memories of her body with mind and sense and smell to keep her going for as long as she could. And while this was going on, I saw this transformation. It’s creepily something out of The Walking Dead. I saw this woman go from saying, “Give me that fork,” “give me that knife,” “give me that spoon,” to “give me that gray,” “give me that blue,” “give me that silver,” to even, “give me that thing. I want that thing,” to “thing, thing, thing,” to nothing. And this went on my entire high school and college career.
It wasn’t until 2013 she passed away to malnutrition. She was unable to eat, speak, do anything. She was bedridden and she passed away with her family all around her. But I will say that, as sad as this story is, my mom was a strong-as-hell woman. She went down fighting every single step of the way.
And more importantly she is the longest-lasting survivor to date with someone who’s been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. They gave her six months, she said, “Screw you. I’m going to live fifteen years.” She pushed the boundaries of what science knew and what people knew about this illness.
For me, she wanted one of her kids to be a star. That’s what she kept saying. I want my kids to change the world with what they're doing and to become the brightest star they can be, to show them how much happiness that she got from her kids.
Ironically enough, I’m that star. I have over half a million subscribers on YouTube, I run my own production company employing fourteen employees worldwide. I get to meet some of the latest and greatest in both film and games. I would not be here had I [not] lived such an incredible crazy journey with her and my family.
Being the youngest of five teaches you a lot. My mom and dad always used to say this phrase, and my dad still does to this day. He says, “One of us… when you're alone by yourself, you're a stick. You can be broken, you can bend, and you can be destroyed. But when all five of you kids get together, you're a bundle and no one can break you and break you down.” That’s the philosophy we've ever lived as a family.
Until this day, we’re all healthy, we’re all still doing the best in our industries. Without my mom, I would not be here today, probably on this microphone.
So yeah, that’s the story of Karen Khalil. Thank you guys for taking your time. I appreciate it.